On May 27, a week before General Motors applied for a trademark for the word "Zora," GM filed a trademark application at the US Patent and Trademark Office for "GearOn," characterized as a "truck bed cargo system comprised of tiered storage cross rails, utility rack stanchions, cargo dividers and cargo tie down rings."

As Ford prepares to hit the market with its x-factor, aluminum-intensive F-150 and Ram sales stand tall enough to meet General Motors truck sales eye-to-eye, GM is putting the word out that it's going to add more features to its trucks and do so more regularly. An executive engineer for pickups told reporters that "a whole array" of changes are on the way as soon as the 2015 model year and then would likely come "the year after that, the year after that, the year after that."

In excess of 475,000 heavy duty pickups were sold in the United States last year – the capable workhorses represented more than 25 percent of the year's full-size pickup volume. But unlike the passenger-car segment, where dozens of makes and models are constantly competing for supremacy, the heavy-duty segment consistently boils down to a four-way battle between the Ford F-250 Super Duty, Ram 2500 and the Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD/GMC Sierra 2500HD twins. And, while today's automobile sho